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Apartment 3-G, 11/5/09

Oh, man, apparently Tommie really isn’t familiar with I Dressed In The Dark, or with the reality TV genre in general, or with the sort of thing that normal humans enjoy as entertainment. If she were, she’d know that she should be jerking about spasmodically for the camera here, clowning it up for the people at home; if she must express negative feelings, they should be big negative feelings, with ostentatious, theatrical bawling. Instead, she’s just looking directly into the camera, and, with a flat expression and eerily affectless voice, describing the terrible emotional desert through which a cruel God has cursed her to wander, like the Israelites, but not as well dressed. I’m assuming that the cameraman is only managing to hold that microphone up through sheer professionalism, and will soon be quietly weeping. Tommie should very much not be allowed on television.

Mary Worth, 11/5/09

Ha ha, look, Adrian is already trying to squirm out of the drunken promises she made to Scott when she thought he was in a coma and couldn’t hear her. Now they’re getting married when he’s “better.” “Adrian, I’m back on my feet and back on the job, and the doctor says that these scars from the bullet wounds are pretty much permanent, so…” “Scott, please! You know I can’t marry a man with any sort of disfigurement! You’ll make sure they heal, if you really love me.”

Gil Thorp, 11/5/09

Congrats to Gil Thorp for depicting what most scientists agree to be the douchiest high-five possible there in panel two. Meanwhile, the parallelism of the two cafeteria scenes leaves one to contemplate the question: where’s a worse place to eat lunch, high school or prison? Your fellow inmates are more likely to shiv you, but at least they won’t stoop to lying about going to your volleyball game.

Dennis the Menace, 11/5/09

I’m sorry, Dennis, this is a game attempt to work within this strip’s restricted ambit of bad behavior, but good manners are never menacing.

B.C., 11/5/09

Ha ha, you see, because one of them wants to kill her, and one of them wants to have sex with her! Women, am I right? They’re like prey animals!

Beetle Bailey, 11/5/09

Honest to God, anyone who opens a gay bar named “McGooey’s” on the outskirts of a US Army base will get free advertising on this site for a year.

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Judge Parker, 10/25/09

I know I’ve been kind of missing in action over the past several Judge Parker storylines, as they just haven’t had that classic mixture of ludicrous and emotionally detached that first drew me to this strip. But I have high hopes for the noir-ish plot brewing now. “D’Vito” is a transparent Bernie Madoff stand-in who was gunned down hours after making bail, and “Henry” is one of his victims, an apparent patsy set up for the murder — oh, and also dying of colon cancer.

Anyway, coming events promise to offer lots of opportunities my favorite Judge Parker recurring theme: that the privileged main characters can just barrel ahead and do whatever the hell they want because rules don’t apply to them. Sam, smelling a rat in this case, visited Henry in jail and essentially told him (Henry) to that he (Sam) would be serving as his (Henry’s) defense attorney, a proposition to which Henry never actually agreed pre se. Nevertheless, I’m sure that the police will allow Sam’s law partner to poke around all the potential evidence in Henry’s house. Also, in those first two panels: lying to get evidence from someone who may be a potential witness or co-conspirator? Sure, why not? All that, and soothing a troubled millionaire whose feeling are apparently tender after he assaulted a photographer are all in a day’s work for Sam Driver: Smug Dick at Law! Oh, and as panel three assures us, there will also be breasts.

Slylock Fox, 10/25/09

Is this the cruelest Slylock Fox Sunday mystery ever? One must picture Max Mouse, finally allowed to go work on a case on his own for once, carefully counting off the paces in some rural backwater, digging enormous holes with a shovel three times as long as he his tall, desperately looking for Slick Smitty’s ill-gotten gain — all while the perp himself is just standing there with his girlfriend, laughing. You have to imagine the level of anxiety he must have reached before he finally pulled out his itty-bitty cell phone to call his boss, who will of course never allow him out of the house alone again now that he’s shown his incompetence at basic ratiocination. It’s a sad, sad day for tiny prey mammals.

Dennis the Menace, 10/25/09

I have to kind of admit that I kind of like this Dennis the Menace for the glimpse it offers us into Henry and Alice’s bucolic pre-Dennis lives. I imagine them in college, both of them tall, gangly young people recruited for their skills on the volleyball court. I like the thought of a pair of mirror-image crushes from afar — Henry attending games played by the women’s team, Alice going to the men’s games, each pair of eyes settling on a player that strikes their fancy, with a long physique that looked good in those short volleyball shorts. Then, at a party thrown by members of one or the other team, the two finally work up the nerve to talk to one another, and, over a few cheap keg beers, begin to see the dim but hopeful outlines of a future together. It will be a future dominated by their awful, hated son, of course, but it would be impossible for them to know that, so let’s leave them for the moment in their youthful happiness.

On that note, I also appreciate the fact that the strip has left to our imagination exactly how Dennis has managed to turn a game of volleyball played in an apparently dry yard into some kind of mud-soaked nightmare.

Beetle Bailey, 10/25/09

In light of the many Beetle Bailey strips that depict man-on-tree sex, I find at least one form of camouflage depicted here particularly troubling.

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Mark Trail, 10/5/09

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Mark Trail’s clan is part of a network of isolated, hard-working, rural-cabin-based families who don’t get many visitors. Our reluctant poachers actually have more than a passing similarity to his old friends who own Sneaky, except instead of harboring sinister raccoons they just have a cat — a heavily sedated or dead cat, if the limp, compliant way it’s just letting Cindy tote it about is any indication. Anyway, one wonders how they all stay in touch. They could swap rustic livin’ tips on the Internet, or at least they could if any of their rustic shacks were actually connected to municipal electric or phone lines.

There’s something distinctly unsettling about Mark’s quick transition from “Rusty has been complaining about my cooking” to “You’re a beautiful young lady, Cindy!” The best case scenario is that Mark is going to set her to rustling up some grub for his young ward, both as a way to get her accustomed to her womanly duties and to see if she’d make a suitable mate for the lad once they both reach the traditional Lost Forest marital age of 13. But more likely, part of the purpose of this camping trip is to teach Rusty that sometimes when you’re very hungry, you need to eat things that you wouldn’t eat otherwise, and Nature’s Way is to start with the smallest and most feeble. (You’ll notice that we haven’t seen Sassy in a while.)

Dennis the Menace, 10/5/09

Today’s Dennis the Menace offers an amusing set of metaphorical nesting Russian dolls when it comes to absolute and relative chronology. Henry Mitchell is the father of a child who, I’ve always assumed, is in the 6-8-year-old range; obviously there’s an extremely wide range of ages that Henry himself could be based on that, but if pressed, I would place him somewhere between 35 and 45, and probably at the lower end of that scale. So, yes, he’s safely in the generation that spawned the whole “cartoons for grownups” phenomenon, which really took off with the monster success of the Simpsons twenty years ago. Which in turn of course means that Dennis could not possibly remember a time when cartoons were, in fact, for kids.

And yet, Henry goes about his day wearing black pants and a white shirt and a bow tie most of the time, which marks him out as a Stereotypical ’50s Dad, which has him being born in, I dunno, 1920 or so. This makes him about 90 years old, or means that he’s watching the 1955 version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Family Guy or whatever (and note that one of the cartoon characters is himself sporting Henry’s trademark outfit) on the DuMont Network.

Apartment 3-G, 10/5/09

Make fun of Dr. P (side note: my new nickname for the Professor is “Dr. P”) all you want, but before I met my wonderful and charming wife, I had a certain attraction to women who were mean, bad, and/or crazy (see also my devotion to Margo Magee), so I can sort of see where he’s coming from here. Pill-addled? Possibly suicidal? Hinting at a troubled, mysterious past? Shouting into the phone at someone who is probably supposed to be bringing her more drugs? Sign me up!

Pluggers, 10/5/09

You know, this cartoon would be a lot less confusing if the sarcastic postal clerk weren’t himself capable of flight. “Sorry, we don’t deliver via carrier pigeon anymore. I mean, I’m a carrier pigeon myself, but … you know, union rules. Now they’ve got me behind this desk, and let me tell you, it’s a drag.”